ll as I.[A]

"I long most impatiently to see my dear Kitty. I had a purse of guineas
given me yesterday by a bishop--all will do well in time.

"From morning to night my lodgings, which by the bye are the genteelest in
town,[B] are full of the greatest company.--I dined these two days with
two ladies of the bedchamber--then with Lord Buckingham, Lord Edgcumb,
Lord Winchelsea, Lord Littleton, a bishop, &c. &c.

"I assure you, my dear Kitty, that Tristram is the fashion.--Pray to God I
may see my dearest girl soon and well.--Adieu.

"Your affectionate friend,

"L. STERNE."

[Footnote A: Can this allude to the death of his wife?--that very year he
tells his daughter he had taken a house at York, "for your mother and
yourself."]

[Footnote B: They were the second house from St. Alban's Street, Pall
Mall.]

* * * * *

HUME, ROBERTSON, AND BIRCH.

The rarest of literary characters is such an historian as Gibbon; but
we know the price which he paid for his acquisitions--unbroken and
undeviating studies. Wilkes, a mere wit, could only discover the drudgery
of compilation in the profound philosopher and painter of men and of
nations. A speculative turn of mind, delighting in generalising principles
and aggregate views, is usually deficient in that closer knowledge,
without which every step we take is on the fairy-ground of conjecture and
theory, very apt to shift its unsubstantial scenes. The researchers are
like the inhabitants of a city who live among its ancient edifices, and
are in the market-places and the streets: but the theorists, occupied by
perspective views, with a more artist-like pencil may impose on us a
general resemblance of things; but often shall we find in those shadowy
outlines how the real objects are nearly, if not wholly lost--for much is
given which is fanciful, and much omitted which is true.

Of our two popular historians, Hume and Robertson, alike in character but
different in genius, it is much to be lamented that neither came to their
tasks with the previous studies of half a life; and their speculative or
theoretical histories are of so much the less value whenever they are
deficient in that closer research which can be obtained only in one way;
not the most agreeable to those literary adventurers, for such they are,
however high they rank in the class of genius, who grasp at early
celebrity, and depend more on themselves than on their researches.

In